“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645In this tract Milton does not speak of himself as a poet, but he embodies that role
throughout, in a poetic style vibrant with striking images and figures, little allego-
ries, small narratives. Often these derive from epic and romance. Milton constructs
citizen–readers and writers who are engaged in “Wars of Truth,” which involve
combat and danger, heroic adventures and trials, constant struggles, difficult quests,
and which stimulate intellectual energy and cultural vibrancy. Moreover, as David
Norbrook observes, the allusive, literary character of this tract and its sublimity of
style give the lie to royalist claims that the revolution’s democratizing impulses will
level and degrade culture.^125 On his title page Milton includes an epigraph taken
from Euripides’s The Suppliant Women, identifying his own “speech” to the English
parliament with Theseus’s speech defending Athenian democracy and its freedom
of speech against Theban tyranny:
This is true Liberty when free born men
Having to advise the public may speak free,
Which he who can, and will, deserv’s high praise,
Who neither can nor will, may hold his peace;
What can be juster in a State then this?^126Milton saw his self-image as a virtuous and learned citizen–author compromised
by prior censorship, which undermines the autonomy and authority that role de-
mands. He describes the demeaning constraints of censorship in language charged
with resentment and frustration founded on personal experience:
What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school... if serious and
elaborat writings, as if they were no more then the theam of a Grammar lad under his
Pedagogue must not be utter’d without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extem-
porizing licencer.... When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason
and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditats, is industrious, and likely consults
and confers with his judicious friends; after all which done he takes himself to be
inform’d in what he writes, as well as any that writ before him; if in this most consummat
act of his fidelity and ripenesse, no years, no industry, no former proof of his abilities
can bring him to that state of maturity, as not to be still mistrusted and suspected,
unlesse [he appear]... with... his censors hand on the back of his title to be his bayl
and surety, that he is no idiot, or seducer, it cannot be but a dishonor and derogation
to the author, to the book, to the priviledge and dignity of Learning. (531–2)As a further insult, an author who wishes to make changes in press must “trudge
again to his leav-giver,” often many times, or else allow the book to come forth
“wors then he had made it, which to a diligent writer is the greatest melancholy and
vexation that can befall.” He queries angrily,
How can a man teach with autority, which is the life of teaching, how can he be a
Doctor in his book as he ought to be, or else had better be silent, whenas all he